Why I have a 512 bit PGP key
Perry E. Metzger
perry at imsi.com
Tue Dec 27 19:07:54 PST 1994
Eric Hughes says:
> From: "Ian Farquhar" <ianf at sydney.sgi.com>
>
> re: personal account tripwire
>
> The problem is that although you can protect the data file of
> hashes (by using a pass phrase to encrypt it), protecting the
> binary which does the checking is rather more difficult.
>
> Why not recompile the binary? All it needs to be is something like
> md5.c.
Read Ken Thompson's Turing Award lecture for why that isn't
sufficient. Its quite amusing.
Lets face it -- if you are truly paranoid, you have to carry your
machine around with you at all times and chain it to you.
Its all a question of threat model. For national security type attacks
nothing less than "chain machine to wrist" will do. For stopping a
casual attack, much less is needed. Its all in the threat model...
Perry
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